The
World has been appalled by another senseless mass killing in America,
this time on the beautiful Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech - 32 mostly
young students gunned down by a deranged killer who then killed himself.
The Korean killer Cho had been found medically to be dangerously deranged
but not sufficiently so as to preclude automatic gun ownership in Virginia
(see: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/america/20tech.php
).

However this further American
Massacre has to be seen in the wider context of US history from the
first English colonial settlement in Jamestown, Virginia (1607) and
thence from Independence in 1776 to the present. America’s history
has been a bloody story of sustained racism, violence and genocide.

Between First Settlement
and 1776 the English settlers engaged in occupation, dispossession and
mass murder of the Indigenous Indians, the killing mechanisms involving
dispossession (and thence starvation), guns and even biological warfare
(e.g. use of smallpox-carrying blankets to spread disease among the
Indian population) (see: Chalk, F. & Jonassohn, K. (1990), The History
and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses and Case Studies (Yale University
Press, New Haven)).

While American propaganda
gives US Independence in 1776 as a victory for the Enlightenment and
Democracy, the cruel reality was that independence from England gave
the Americans carte blanche to invade Indian lands to the West (prohibited
at the time by the English for complex diplomatic and strategic reasons,
as I have confirmed in recent discussion with an eminent American History
scholar). The genocide of the American Indians followed inexorably from
the immediate post-1776 movement westward, through Jackson’s 1830
“Indian Removal Act” to remove Indians from lands east of
the Mississippi, the conquest of the Plains and thence the final decimation
of the Pacific coast Indians (see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
).

The genocide continued with
the conquest of Hawaii (1898), American Samoa (1899) and former Spanish
colonies from the Caribbean to the Philippines (where the 1899-1902
Philippines War cost 1 million Filipino lives). In the 20th century
American imperialism dominated Latin America and in the post-1950 era
left a bloody footprint in Africa (backing civil wars) and in Asia,
where the post-1950 US Asian Wars have been associated (so far) with
19 million excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have
to happen).

Most of this appalling carnage
has been swept under the carpet. The American people are notorious for
their ignorance of world geography (in my experience some thinking that
my home state of Tasmania is somewhere in Africa or that Australia might
be in Central Europe through confusion with Tanzania and Austria, respectively).
Yet America acts as though it owns the world. Indeed the carnage of
US imperialism and US “democratic imperialism” ( democratic
tyranny, democratic Nazism) will be exceeded by Climate Genocide due
to American Climate Criminals. America is the world’s biggest
greenhouse gas polluter, and like Australia (the big country with the
highest annual per capita carbon dioxide pollution and the world’s
biggest coal exporter), refuses to sign Kyoto and refuses to constrain
carbon dioxide pollution. The Bush-ite American and Bush-ite Australian
Climate Criminals are threatening the world (especially deltaic Africa
and Asia) with Climate Genocide and indeed threatening the Planet with
Terracide.

The past and present US mass
murder and genocide is largely un-reported by lying, racist, genocide-ignoring
Mainstream media and Racist Bush-ite (RB) America (and its lackey Racist
White Australia) are ruled by régimes locked into denial over
the seriousness of global warming. That US mass murder continues today
at home and abroad can fundamentally be explained in part by the dictum
“history ignored yields history repeated”. The Mainstream
media coverage of the appalling Blacksburg Massacre (33 deaths in total
including that of the perpetrator) contrasts with failure of Mainstream
media to report that on the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
the post-invasion excess deaths totaled 1 million (see Countercurrents:
http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya220307.htm
).

Thus inspection of the UNICEF
website (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iraq.html
) reveals that in Occupied Iraq about 122,000 under-5 year old infants
are dying every year (2005 figures). Comparison with other countries
indicates that about 90% of this carnage is avoidable and thus 110,000
under-5 year old Iraqi infants are dying avoidably under US occupation
each year – evidence of gross American violation of the Geneva
Convention that demands that Occupiers do everything in their power
to keep their Conquered Subjects – and especially Children - ALIVE
(see Articles 38, 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention to the Protection
of Civilian Persons in Time of War: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y4gcpcp.htm
).

The carnage of American-imposed
passive mass murder of 110,000 Iraqi infants annually is better understood
in a shorter time frame – it corresponds to the Americans killing
about 300 Iraqi infants daily or about one every 5 minutes. However
America is occupying a swathe of impoverished countries across the world
either through its own forces (in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan)
or through US-armed and US-backed surrogates (as in Occupied Haiti,
Occupied Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territory). The “under-5
infant deaths” (90% avoidable) in the Occupied Iraq and Afghan
Territories alone total 0.5 million per year i.e. 1,300 daily and one
per minute – un-reported by racist, ;lying Mainstream media but
an awful truth that is only several mouse clicks away on the UNICEF
website.

Australia in 1994 already
had annual gun-related deaths five times lower than in the US. After
the Port Arthur Massacre (Tasmania, April 1996) subsequent stringent
Australian gun control laws halved the annual gun-related deaths (see:
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/14010/42/
). The intransigent pro-Gun, pro-War, pro-Violence Bush-ite American
culture has a prime responsibility for the Blacksburg Massacre together
with lying, racist Mainstream media. Madman Cho pulled the trigger,
but the pro-Gun Lobby, the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bushites
and the pro-Bush Racist Zionists (RZs) are responsible for a Bush Administration
that permits madmen to mass murder at home and abroad.

The Blacksburg Massacre was
enabled because America is awash with guns, has a power-obsessed, abusive
and racist culture and IGNORES the appalling human consequences of its
actions.